Hot Diggety! Matthew Glanville was rumored to have written:
> But, I have found bulk loading tapes with the door open on the 3584 is a
> problem when tapes are in the drives. I had to figure out which slots NOT
> to put tapes into because those are the slots that the tapes in the drives
> use.  When TSM tries to unload a tape after you closed the door it knew
> which slot it was in and tries to put it there, thus failing if you have
> manually put a tape there.  A simple audit library check=barcode don't work
> as it wont run until all drives are unmounted... Is that called a paradox
> or a conundrum?

With TSM v5, you can parse the output of an undocumented (I think?) command:

tsm> show library <libraryname>

It will have something like this for the drive that has a tape loaded:

      loaded volume home slot=1033
      loaded volume name=ROC007

That tells you a) what the tape label name is that's loaded in drive right
now, and b) which element number it was originally fetched from.

So you just basically parse the output of that command and find out all
the home slot numbers, and *NOT* load tapes in them. Volume name may be
useful if you're going to be physically eyeballing the library, but
otherwise not programmatically useful.

I'm not sure if there's a better and documented command to do the same
sort of thing. Also, don't recall if this existed in previous versions,
but pretty sure I remember seeing it in TSM v4.

Alternatively, if you're using AIX, you could parse the output of:

# tapeutil -f /dev/smc0 inventory

Something along the lines of:

# tapeutil -f /dev/smc0 inventory|grep -p "^Drive Address "| \
        grep "Source Element Address"|grep -v Valid | \
        awk '{print $NF}'

-Dan